The More Than Human Perspective in Contemporary Poetry: A Poem and Interview on the Bob Cat from Dana Graef

Interview by Zoë Brigley

This week we meet Dana J. Graef, who lives in central Connecticut. Her poems have recently appeared in Beaver Magazine, Wales Haiku Journal, and The Nature of Our Times anthology. Her micro-chapbook Vanishing was published in 2024 (tiny wren publishing), and she has also written articles and essays on mining, wildness, and climate change.

The Bob Cat

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Zoë Brigley: This poem is so moving and it reminds me that we live in an age when our time is dominated by errands and chores and stress and worry and work. Was the poem written to remind yourself and readers of a little perspective?

Thank you so much. I hadn’t thought about it that way, but in a sense, yes. When I wrote this poem, I was grappling with questions of perspective. I was thinking about how hard it is to just be, especially when we’re focused on the next thing, and the next, and the next… 

This poem emerged during a period of my life that was dominated by uncertainty. I just wanted to know my future. Writing this poem reminded me that I couldn’t predict what was going to happen later that day, much less in a month or a year. I go for a walk expecting a garden, and I find something else. Plants uprooted. A bobcat.

When I saw the bobcat my body stopped, even while my mind was moving. Poetry became a way to slow down, to dwell in a few seconds of time. For me, writing can be an act of deep care, and a way to acknowledge and honor the more-than-human world—I hope this poem does that, as well.

Zoë: I admire the way the form cascades down the page. What inspired that?

That’s great to hear, since it took a lot of time, trial and error, and many, many drafts to reach this form. The first draft was left-justified, and most of the lines remained that way for a long time, but that began to feel a bit too static for this poem.

At one point, I wondered if this was a prose poem—but it most definitely wasn’t. I think that attempt told me that the words needed to move across the page in different ways. The poem is narrative, but not prose.

Ultimately, I wanted the form to convey the feelings I was experiencing during the moments I write about—a sense of restlessness, the physical movement and pauses during my walk, the sensation of my mind jumping, here and there, forward and back—as well as the back and forth between expectation and world-as-is, presence and absence.

Even though this is a longer poem, I also read and write haiku, which has led me to think about juxtapositions—and to linger in a few words at a time. I hope the form of “The Bobcat” allows for a sense of movement, but also moments of stillness.

Zoë: That moment when the garden has been uprooted is a wrench. We were talking at MODRON this week about how ecological crisis includes large cataclysmic events like wildfires and tornados but also smaller ones like the drop in number of an insect species in a particular area. I wonder what you make of that idea? 

Your question leads me to think about scale, perspective, and interconnection. When we talk about crises, I tend to ask—crisis for whom? Who is affected most deeply and how, and who continues to profit? How might we trace our own webs of interconnection?

Your example of the insects reminded me of Annapolis, Maryland, where I lived for several years in a relatively new apartment building. When periodical cicadas began to emerge in 2021, after seventeen years underground, my husband and I suddenly saw our building differently.

I wondered about the cicadas who had been dug up for our foundation, and the land sealed over for the parking lot. There’s so much life out of sight, and below the surface, that we can forget. But for the cicada nymphs who lost their lives, that was everything. I began a piece that spring about my encounters with cicadas, which was later published in Split Rock Review.

Later that same year, a tornado tore through Annapolis. I remember sheltering in a closet. The tornado left a narrow path of destruction—including downed trees, and roofs pulled from businesses and homes. For the people who were impacted, the tornado was a sudden event, but that initiated a long-term response, which is also a series of moments dealing with life disruptions. Insurance, finances, the logistics of rebuilding—or not, in some cases. I don’t know what is small and what is large in that context. I imagine even a single phone call can be a massive thing.

And the tornado was not an isolated event. It emerged from remnants of a major hurricane. The hurricane was strengthened by climate change.

When I think about sudden disaster, I’m reminded of a poem, “Construction” by Danusha Laméris, about life in the “aftermath.” That word has stayed with me. I think all of us are living in different forms of aftermath—sometimes visible, and sometimes invisible to those around us.

Zoë: You mention the distance of looking at the creature through a screen. How might it help us to look without capturing a moment or viewing it through a lens?

I went for a walk to think about this question—into the park that appears in my poem, and around a field with a large white oak tree, where I saw the bobcat.

I’ve been photographing the oak tree for several years, in different seasons and qualities of light. I love photography as a way of understanding the world. That said—with my phone held up, in camera mode, I’m not looking at the tree—I’m looking at a representation of the tree on my small screen. I’m asking myself different questions: how is the light; how is the angle? What do I want to include (or not) in the frame? I’m focusing on a two-dimensional image, not the living being.

When I put my phone away, I notice the limits of the screen’s field of view. I’m more attuned to my own vision, as well as other senses. My field of view is not a rectangle. There is movement in my peripheral vision. I hear rainfall, birdsong. My eyes linger on the edges of the tree. I’m not wondering if green on green is too little contrast. I’m just noticing it.

In some situations, being able to record is vital. And thinking back, I understand my impulse to reach for my phone when I saw the bobcat. It was exciting and I wanted to remember it—and I wanted to be sure of what I was seeing. But when I’m taking a picture, I think that some part of my brain hands itself over to the device, allows the phone to sense for me.

Moments of mutual perception hold so much possibility. When an owl’s eyes turn towards you. When a bobcat stops and notices. When a beetle lands on your finger. If I don’t take a photo at all, I recognize that I might not remember. In some ways it’s an act of letting go.

Zoë: Is there anything else you want to tell us about this poem?

I first drafted this poem in October 2023, shortly after seeing the bobcat. I wanted to write about that afternoon, and just three days later, I began an online workshop with Elizabeth Bradfield through Orion Magazine. In the first session, she prompted us to write about a moment of encounter with the more-than-human world—and the first draft just poured out, as if it was already waiting to emerge. She also encouraged us to write beyond what we might typically imagine as poetic—and to ask ourselves, “How am I part of the mess?” That question shaped my approach to this poem.

Looking back, I could answer many of the questions that were preoccupying me at the time—I’ve lived my way into that future—and yet, in some ways it’s endless. There’s always another thing, something pending, something unresolved. Sometimes life is what we imagined, or even feared, and sometimes, it’s otherwise. In the years since I first drafted this poem, I’ve only seen bobcats a couple of times—always in the fall. Once crossing the same field with the oak, and once in a different field on a mown pathway in October, sitting and lying in a circle of light.